An Empirical Study Of The Non-English Majors’ Strategies For Speech Act Of Refusal

As we all know, pragmatic competence has been always a topic heatedly discussed inforeign language teaching. Students’ speech acts embody their pragmatic competence. Speechact of refusal, a kind of speech act, is frequently used in students’ daily life and, at the sametime, is an important issue of pragmatic research. Whether it is used accurately will have aninfluence on the communication and relationship between each other. Some scholars andresearchers have done a lot of research on it, but the subjects of the researches were mostlyamong English majors or postgraduates, etc, seldom having been done among non-Englishmajors. My thesis tries to do research on speech acts of refusal of non-English majors, so asto help them use refusal acts better.Speech act of refusal, with the potential of threatening face, can be divided into directand indirect refusals. The indirectness of speech act of refusal is in direct relation topoliteness. Refusal speech act is performed by different refusal strategies, and is affected by agreat many factors such as age, sex, level of education, social hierarchy and so on. Among theabove-mentioned factors, two are fatal: One is social power, and the other is social distance.My thesis designed fourteen situations according to different social power and social distanceand made a survey of non-English majors’ refusing to request, invitation, suggestion and offerrespectively in each of the situations.According to the survey, we find that not only one strategy is used in every refusal butmany strategies are used meanwhile. Refusal strategies often occur in a form of combination.In addition, when using refusal speech acts, some pragmatic errors pop up at times. Wediscover that pragmatic competence of non-English majors is not strong enough to satisfytheir daily communication, which should be improved.With the further development of China’s reform and opening-up, the contact betweenChina and the outside world becomes closer and closer. The utmost purpose of Englishteaching is to cultivate students’ communication competence. However, at present, theEnglish pragmatic competence of non-English majors in our country is not optimistic. TheEnglish learners in China often complain that after learning English for several years, theycannot communicate with the native speakers fluently, accurately and successfully althoughtheir grammar is proper. Therefore, it is of realistic significance to explore how to cultivatethe pragmatic competence of English learners in China’s foreign language setting. Accordingto the research analysis, my thesis attempts to explore some suggestions on how to cultivatenon-English majors’ pragmatic competence from a relatively practical perspective. I hope my research could be a guide to the future teaching of non-English majors,making students use refusal acts better when communicating with foreigners and helpingimprove their English practical application ability.